Bathing Care Assistance with Robot Suit HAL
In the field of nursing care, caregivers have to bear a great burden due to assistive movements such as supporting of the care-receivers body, lifting them, moving them onto the wheel chair etc. In this paper, we focus on getting a carereceiver in and out of the bathtub, which is one of the most dif.cult movements for caregivers. Considering an important activity that puts a large burden on caregivers, lifting, there are many types of lifting devices available for transferring disabled people. Nevertheless it is dif.cult to use .xed equipment such as a mechanical lift with home care because it is expensive to rebuild the bathroom. The physical burden involved in assisting action in the .eld of nursing care can be greatly reduced by wearing the HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) full-body type. The objectives of this paper are to propose a new method of bathing care assistance using the robot suit HAL, to develop the upper half body of HAL, which reduces the physical burden on the wearer抯 upper limbs, and to show its effectiveness through an experiment. The study focused on reducing the trunk inclination angle, which is related to the physical load around the lumbar spine. The new method mainly uses the caregiver抯 upper limb to support the weight of the care-receiver. Therefore, we built a mechanism which locks the power unit of a HAL joint to assist the motor function of the wearer抯 upper limbs. To con.rm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we demonstrated that the mechanisms of the power units kept the angles of the upper limbs steady while the wearer held a weight of 50(kg), and that the physical burden on the upper limb of the wearer was reduced. As a results of this experiment, we con.rmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Hozumi Satoh Tomoyoshi Kawabata Yoshiyuki Sankai
School of Systems and Information Engineering,University of Tsukuba,1-1-1,Tennodai,Tsukuba,Ibaraki,3 Faculty of Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering,University of Tsukuba
国际会议
2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics(2009 IEEE 机器人与仿生技术国际会议 ROBIO 2009)
桂林
英文
498-503
2009-12-19（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）